Scheduling Hitting Partners at a Tennis Tournament

By the middle Wednesday of most tournaments, half the original draw is gone, but plenty of those players haven't left the site. They're staying for doubles, waiting on a flight, or just want to keep sharp, and a lot of them end up hitting with whoever still needs a partner. Most practice guidelines never mention this explicitly by name, yet almost every desk ends up managing it informally, which is exactly where the fairness disputes start.

Who actually counts as a hitting partner

A hitting partner is anyone booked onto a court to feed balls or rally, without themselves being the player the slot is allocated to. That covers three quite different people: a player's own paid or unpaid practice partner, an outside hitter brought in specifically for that job, and an eliminated tournament player picking up extra work on site. The guidelines lump the first two together as a single sign-in category. The third is the one desks handle case by case, because that player is still a competitor in the system, not a guest.

Why eliminated players are the obvious source

Court demand doesn't fall as fast as the draw does. A 96-draw event still has dozens of players wanting practice in the second week, but far fewer matches to schedule around, so eliminated players who stick around are a ready pool of hitting partners who already know the site, the courts and the desk. The 2026 ATP and WTA rulebooks both note that eliminated players remaining on site can be used this way, without setting a fixed process for it, which is why it tends to run on word of mouth rather than a queue.

Where a hitting partner sits in the priority order

• During peak hours (typically 10am to 4pm), a player may only sign onto a court with another tournament player, not with a coach or a hitting partner
• Outside peak hours, a player can book with a coach or hitting partner freely
• A hitting partner never displaces a player's own priority tier; they simply fill the second name on a slot the player already qualifies for
• Doubles teams still share a court with another doubles team in peak, regardless of who is hitting with whom

Giving hitting partners the right access, not the player's access

This is where a lot of desks overcomplicate things. A hitting partner doesn't need to request courts, override anyone, or see other players' bookings. What they need is visibility: what's coming up for them today, on which court, at what time, and ideally a nudge shortly before it starts so they're not chasing the desk for the same information. Treat it as a read-only view tied to the sessions they've actually been added to, rather than a full player account, and most of the back-and-forth disappears on its own.

Mistakes that show up at busy desks

• Booking a hitting partner into a peak slot as the second name, which breaches the tournament-player-only rule
• Losing track of who a semi-regular hitting partner actually is once a name gets shortened or misspelled across shifts
• Failing to tell the hitting partner about a late court change, so they show up to the wrong court
• Letting an eliminated player rack up more court time as a hitting partner than the active players still queuing for slots

None of this needs a separate system, just a way to add a second name to a booking that isn't a full player profile, and a notification that reaches them without anyone re-typing a WhatsApp message. Maindraw handles hitting partners as their own lightweight role: added to a specific session, given a read-only view of what's booked, and notified automatically, while the peak-hour and priority rules keep applying underneath without the desk having to remember them.